


Whispers

by Path



Category: Exalted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-14
Updated: 2011-03-14
Packaged: 2017-10-16 23:26:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/170502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Path/pseuds/Path
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The deathknight Ashes Offered on the Altar searches for his masters' will.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whispers

The warehouse hasn't been used for years; broken crates and rusty abandoned tools lie scattered around the main floor. A slim solitary figure slips through the door; the old hinges whine as he draws it shut behind him. He makes his way up the derelict stairs with difficulty, hauling his heavy load- but it is the last trip, and the knowledge makes it lighter. The room he steps into is covered in dust- an old office, desk splintered in the corner from looters, back when the owners first left. The air is musty, and if there were windows, the heavy air would glitter thickly with particles in the grey sunlight.

The man sighs as he empties his heavy bucket, pouring litres of cold water into the half-filled basin on the floor. He places his bucket by the door precisely- perhaps he will require it again. Then he slings the leather bag from his shoulders and places it in the center of the room.

He stretches a moment, loosening shoulders clenched from several such trips, and settles himself. He begins.

The robe, first. White cotton, loosely woven, hooded, with long draping sleeves, simply yards and yards of fabric once carefully bleached. He strips it off slowly- first, the clasp at the neck, very high, then down the chest, slipping one thin arm out, then the other. Beneath, he wears a short white tunic and cropped trousers. High above the neckline of the tunic is his scar, deep and jagged. It crosses from one shoulder, dips into the curve of his collar bone and across the base of his neck, then darts suddenly downward over his heart. The grey skin around is puckered- no stitches ever set, no chance for the skin to graft itself together. It is closed, unbleeding, and clearly long-healed, but the skin is vivid, the only part of his body with colour. It is saturated, a deep purple-red, as if it were only now welling up for the first time.

He removes the tunic and trousers, too, and stands naked and thin in the empty room. From his bag he takes his implements: a leather pouch, a shallow carved bone dish, a sharp slice of rock, placing them too with precise movements on the floor before him. He kneels before them and the basin, unwrapping the pouch, looping the long leather thong around his hand. He cups the loose bag in one hand, scooping a little of the precious contents into the bone dish before quickly wrapping up the rest. Then the second step.

He begins with the face, splashing long smears of vermillion paint like blood across him. He swipes beneath his eyes and trails crimson down his cheeks, then again beneath his cheekbones, in the soft space behind his ears and running down the sides of his neck. Then the body, down his thin chest, vivid and brilliant against his ashy skin, an arc up his stomach, then lines behind his knees and cresting the long tendon behind his heels. His hands he dabs with spiked circles across the palm and long swipes across his wrists and up his forearms. Finally, the last, smearing all his remaining paint to anoint the scar across his neck. Already he feels it burning into his flesh, the touch of mercury and sulfur.

The third step. He reaches for the dagger, the crescent of chipped obsidian, and begins to touch his flesh with more than paint, deepening the vermillion with blood as well. He is always surprised at the colour, no matter how many times he sees it. That tone, that life-drenched blue-red, should be the property of the living. He doesn't know why his blood, too, hasn't bleached to white, but the fact that it stays the hue of precious cinnabar shocks him each time he draws it.

...across the wrists, a thin trail up the forearms, and then the most important, slicing again into the scar, and it is complete.

The fourth step is quick; he breathes in. He feels the vermillion seeping into his wounds, stinging, tiny needles in delicate cuts, harsh and excruciatingly painful at his neck. With the breath, he feels energy flow through him, the rush of power and truth, and opens his mind. His caste-mark blossoms on his forehead, as if an arrow pierced it, the great hole erupting from within him. He can feel the pull as it seems to suck at the world, and there is a faint whistling sound. Cold begins to leak down his face, blood chilled by the emptiness inside him. First it slides down around his nose, marking the lines around his mouth, but then it begins to catch on the thickly-smeared paint, welling up on it and filling his eyes.

That is the last step. He falls forward, hands clenching the sides of the metal basin and plunging his head and shoulders into freezing water.

For a moment, nothing.

Then he opens his eyes. Red. The water is thick, spumes of blood mixing with the slowly-dissolving paint, colouring the tank. Still, it is not opaque, and he sees the rust, the dents, the dull surface of the metal with the clarity brought on by shock. There is where he once dropped it and had to smash the edge into shape with a stone; there is where once he reacted to the visions and cracked his head on the side. His pulse, usually sluggish, faint, a drum with loosened skin, is bursting into frenetic beats as his body still fights for freedom. He clenches thin fingers, digging them into the sides of the basin. They scrabble against the sides, slick with paint and blood, but hold. His pulse is fast, fast, not like running in life but like dying he feels the arms holding him down once more the rush and frenzied flailing and terror and _death is here_ -

Then, everything.

His mind explodes. Emptiness, a gap bigger than the world, yawns open beneath him. He is falling, falling, and the world swirls on past him. The tearing hands are ripped from him. He turns, in the emptiness that cannot be called "air", and even the blood, still blossoming as into water, swirls on faster than he falls.

It is slow. At the edges of his vision, he can see rocks, teeth, as everything he knows and so much he doesn't falls past him, swallowed by the End of All Things, the Maw That Eats the World. His heart bursts into motion again, and tears well in his eyes. The emptiness, the meaninglessness, the cruelties and harshness of the world, taken away from him by the One Constant.

He gasps as he arcs his head backwards into air once more, water streaking from his hair to trace a pattern across the room, falling in bright splotches through the dust. Paint and blood and water drip in pale red patterns down his body, diluted. His eyes are open, wide and staring, full of tears and blood and frantic, fanatic joy.

 

It will all be taken away someday. Someday, he will be spared the world. The work, the hardness, the evils- they will be stripped away, leaving a world calm and cool, and then it too will be gone, and then he.

 

He will be the last. He knows. It is the Will of the End.

**Author's Note:**

> Ashes Offered on the Altar is a Midnight Caste Abyssal who was ritually sacrificed by his own cult as a godblooded mortal. He reproduces his death to channel the Whispers of the Neverborn.


End file.
